Decision-Theoretic Football Lottery Design under Uncertainty and Market Bias

Abstract

Sports Wagering Decision Theory is increasingly shaped by the need to reconcile performance with evidence quality, resource limits, and transfer across settings. This comparative analysis considers separating predictive accuracy from utility, payout structure, and correlated market beliefs. The evidence base combines 1 focal paper with 11 independently retrieved publications whose DOI or publisher records were checked before inclusion. The analysis is organized around proper scoring, market information, utility, correlation, and responsible use. A central precaution is not to treat reported gains as context-free quantities, the review compares problem formulation, design assumptions, and transfer boundary. Across the literature, the evidence indicates that advances in sports wagering decision theory become credible when behavior, measurement, and decision context are evaluated together and when uncertainty about selection effects is reported explicitly. The resulting account aligns method selection to downstream risk and the conditions that weaken external validity, and proposes a research agenda centered on auditable baselines, controlled perturbations, and replicable records.